Fire in the Wind (3 page)

Jake looked at her, taking in the details of her gold-flecked dark eyes, high forehead, hollow cheeks and wide full mouth with an intensity that disturbed her.

"No," he said after a moment. "You're far too beautiful to be a model."

Vanessa swallowed. He was too good at this. He had made that sound not like the easy, practised compliment it was, but as though the admission had been torn from him. Vanessa wasn't beautiful; she had never been beautiful, but looking into his eyes she could almost believe that Jake thought her so.

On their journey across to the bar he had neatly evaded several people who were trying to catch his attention, but now there was one man who wasn't taking the hint. As Jake waited for their drinks the man elbowed up beside him.

"Say, Conrad, I've been trying to get past your secretary for a week—" he began, but the rest of the conversation was lost on Vanessa as a pinwheel of stars went off in her head.

"What did he call you?" she asked distantly when Jake had finished with the man and returned to hand her her drink.

Jake raised his eyebrows. "Did he call me something?"

"A name," she said. "I mean, your name. What is your name?"

He looked down at her, still, unmoving. "Conrad," he said. "My name is Jake Conrad."

She would not have believed it would affect her like this, just the sound of that name making her tremble inside. Vanessa gazed into the pale wine in her glass, trying to collect herself.

"How extraordinary," she said, wondering if her voice sounded as high to his ears as it did to her own. "I knew a Conrad once, a long time ago. Jason Conrad. He was from Vancouver. I wonder if you know him?"

"Jason Conrad is my name," he said slowly.

"It is?" she squeaked. It shook her; she looked into the dark face, the hooded eyes more closely, as though for some evidence she might have missed.

"The thing is, you do look... your eyes...." She faltered and trailed off, and began again. "There is something about you that reminds me of Jace," she said with a laugh. "I don't suppose you're related to him?"

"Jace," he repeated thoughtfully. "It's been a long time—" He broke off. "How long ago did you know him?"

"Nearly ten years ago," answered Vanessa. "In New York."

"That's a long time between visits," he said, and his odd crooked smile had an edge now. "What caused you suddenly to come searching for an old lover like this, I wonder?"

"What makes you think he's an old lover?"

"Your eyes, Vanessa. They give you away." He smiled more broadly, but his gaze was dark. "They also intrigue me. So full of mystery. Why are you coming for Jace Conrad now?"

He knows something,
she thought uneasily, looking up at him. What did he know?

"I'm not coming for him!" she retorted crossly. "I'm here in Vancouver for the fashion show. Some of my designs are being shown. And it crossed my mind that I might look him up."

Jake's eyes glinted down at her. "And what will your husband think of that?" he asked. She felt as though some other question were being asked, too. But she didn't know what question.

Vanessa ran her thumb across the protective gold band she still wore. "My husband is dead," she murmured.

His eyes hardened, and she knew she had answered the unspoken question, too. "Ah," he breathed. "A widow. Poor old Jace. He missed it. The beautiful widow Vanessa came for him and he missed it."

This was unaccountable hostility. Vanessa looked up at him. "You talk as though you know him," she said tentatively. She could think of no other reason for his attitude; he must know the other Jason Conrad, and he must know what she had done to him. "Do you know him?" she prompted. She felt oddly confused; if he had told her then that
he
was the Jason Conrad she had known she might almost have believed him.

"Yes, I knew him," said Jake, his eyes suddenly very heavy lidded, his expression unreadable. "We were related: Jason Conrad was my cousin. We had the same name."

Vanessa breathed a dismayed gasp at his use of the past tense.

"Was?" she whispered.

He blinked pityingly down at her. "Jace Conrad is dead, too, Vanessa," he said. "Looks like you lost them both."

Without warning the world went black.

* * *

"Come on, drink this," said the deep, commanding voice above her head. There was a strong scent of brandy under her nose. Vanessa pushed at the glass and the hand holding it. She was lying on something soft.

"I don't need that," she said, struggling to sit up. "I'm all right."

Jake Conrad helped her to sit up. "Are you?" he asked.

She had a splitting headache, that was all. She watched as Jake set the glass down on a table beside her and sank into a chair nearby. She looked around. They were in some kind of private lounge, and she remembered that Gary had told her this was Jake's hotel.

"I'm fine," she repeated, putting her hand to the back of her head. "My head aches. What happened?"

"You fainted," Jake Conrad said briefly. "When did you eat last?"

"Oh," she said, remembering. She looked at him. "You're Jace's cousin. You told me that he's dead." She wondered why she had fainted; it had all been so long ago. She hadn't been in love with Jace for years.

"And you fainted," Jake Conrad repeated. "I'm curious: did you faint when your husband died, Vanessa?"

That was a brutal thing to ask, but she was too shaken to be angry. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. Her head ached abominably. She wondered if she had struck it when she fell. "My husband was terminally ill for some time before he died," she said. "I knew it was coming."

"You knew Jace well," he said. He was watching her closely, one ankle across the other knee, the heavy crystal glass in his hand warm with the glow of amber liquid.

"Yes," she said softly. "Pretty well." Well enough to have loved him, but now he was dead. She touched her forehead. "Did I hit my head when I fell?" She had never had a headache like this—except once, she remembered, on her wedding day.

"You didn't fall," said Jake Conrad. "You collapsed against me and I caught you before you went down." He glanced towards the other end of the sofa she was sitting on and she looked to see the jacket of his suit lying there, a dark damp patch on the front where she must have spilled her drink.

"Thank you," she said mechanically. The pain in her head was all Jace, then. Well, she had tried. She had tried to forget him.

"What was it?" Jake asked suddenly, as though he couldn't help himself. "A summer romance?"

She thought of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza, of snow falling thickly on dark nights, of the laughter of ice skaters floating in the afternoon air....

"No," she said dully. "Not exactly."

There was silence between them for a long moment, and then Vanessa found the courage to ask, "How did he die?"

He paused. "Of complications following an accident," he said.

Vanessa sat up and said breathlessly, feeling as though her heart had been clenched in a fist, "
When?
It wasn't—it couldn't have been the accident he had back then, could it? "

Jake blinked. "Yes, that's right," he said briefly.

"Complications?
But he was all right; he was perfectly all right!" she protested. "What went wrong?"

"I honestly don't remember at this distance in time," said Jake. "It was nearly ten years ago."

And she hadn't known. All these years she had imagined him alive somewhere, marrying, raising children, settling into a life that took him farther and farther away from her—and all the time he had been dead. Vital, laughing Jace had been dead practically since the night of their last goodbye, the night whose memory had never left her, for all her attempts to banish it....

She had been doing volunteer work at the hospital a few hours a week while attending a design course at college. Jace Conrad had been brought in late one afternoon after a traffic accident, with several broken bones and a face cut to ribbons. He was a Canadian, he was in New York alone, there was no one to visit him. His eyes were swollen shut; he was bored and lonely and very irritable.

"I don't need sympathetic visits from little do-gooders!" he had stormed at Vanessa the first time she had tentatively suggested that he might like her to visit with him or read to him. Vanessa was young and vulnerable, and she had retired into hurt silence. After that she spoke to him as little as possible, quietly and unobtrusively bringing him the coffee he asked for.

"Dammit," he said suddenly one day, "can't a man have one show of temper without wounding you forever? You used to laugh and chatter, and now when you come in here I feel as though I'm on death row."

"How do you know it's me?" she asked in astonishment, gazing at the bandaged face with its swollen, unseeing eyes.

"Well, of course I know!" he exclaimed impatiently, as though that were explanation enough. She felt a little flutter in her stomach, as though he had said something very significant.

She was as good as engaged to her childhood sweetheart, Larry, but she wasn't wearing a ring. In a very short time she was coming to the hospital every day to visit Jace, and by the time the stitches had been removed from his face they were in love.

He was released from hospital just as she began her college Christmas break, and then they spent all day, every day together. Sight-seeing, window-shopping, walking through an early thick snowfall, warming themselves over coffee, singing carols—everything they did was magical, bathed in the glow of their love. He loved New York City, and he showed Vanessa her own city in a way she had never seen it, the tourists' New York. She copied his accent, not so very different from her own, saying "oot" and "aboot" instead of "out" and "about." He told her she sounded like a demented Scotswoman, not a Canadian, but, laughing, she insisted that she sounded just like him. One day a waitress paused to talk to them about Canada and told Vanessa how much she admired her country and wanted to visit. With a straight face Vanessa urged her to do so, telling her in her atrocious mock accent that Vancouver was the most beautiful city in the world.

"I told you so!" she crowed when the waitress had gone. Jace shook his head, smiling.

"After this I believe anything," he said.

He had to return home. His face needed surgery, and his work wouldn't wait forever, even though he was in his father's business. She promised to go and visit him at her Easter break, and it was unspoken between them that he would ask her to marry him then and she would say yes.

Jace was scheduled to leave on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. On their last night together he took her to a very special restaurant, and then they walked through cold streets white with a fresh snow that hadn't yet turned to grey slush, and then, unable to part, they had gone back to his hotel room.

His body was battered, bandaged and sore, but he wanted her; like a soldier going to war he wanted the memory of her to take with him, like a promise.

She wanted to give him that promise; he was her first lover, and she loved him more than anything in the world. "But you'll start bleeding again!" she protested, half-laughing.

"I bleed every time I look at you," Jace said hoarsely, reaching for her, and her smile died on her lips when she saw the look in his eyes.

She was nervous, being undressed by a man for the first time. Jake was clumsily one-handed, his other wrist in plaster, his arm in a sling, but the intensity of his gaze as he looked at her breasts and her body for the first time stilled her fears, made her want to weep for joy. This was why her breasts were full and rounded, she learned, so that Jace's eyes would close helplessly when he saw them; this was the reason her waist narrowed in just that way above her hips, so that his hand would tremble as it followed the curve to her thigh.

He told her it was so. "I've never loved a woman in the world but you, Vanessa," he said, clenching his jaw as though the love he felt was almost a torment. "Do you believe that? I've never loved anyone the way I love you. And I love you enough for a thousand lifetimes. I must have been saving all my love for you; I must have known."

His hoarse voice started a fire in her, and he saw the look in her eyes and smiled in triumphant intensity. "Help me take off my clothes," he commanded then. "I want to feel your skin touching mine."

He was bandaged at ribs, shoulder, arm, knee, shin and ankle, and they had laughed as she undressed him, because it seemed as though she hardly undressed him at all.

But she was shaken to the core when she saw what power she had over him, and her laughter died in her throat. She was suddenly desperate for his touch, desperate for him to take what he needed from her body.

Jace knew it, and he lay back against the pillows, his eyes burning into hers. "Come here, Vanessa," he whispered, and she lay beside him and rested her head on his bandaged shoulder while his one good hand stroked her with a gentle magical passion.

"Give yourself to me," he said softly. "I need to feel your pleasure, Vanessa. I need it."

Because of his need, of the heat of his love, because in that moment she trusted him completely, she let go, allowing him to give her the shuddering pleasure he wanted to give her. She understood that her need to have him take what he wanted from her body had enclosed the seeds of another need: to be given the pleasure she suddenly needed from his. And she learned that there was no greater joy in the world than this sweet wild commingling of giving and receiving.